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Kenneth L. Pike (19122000)

Kenneth L. Pike

2. Joy and stress as pushing my first linguistic decade, 19351945

2.1 Starting new dreamsfrom sadness

I was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1912 (as the seventh of eight
childrenEunice was the eighth). It was a small New England Village, on
the common. There was a one-room red brick school house, with eight
grades, one teacher, and about thirty students. The village was half a
crossroadswith one general store for groceries, mail, hardware, and
gasoline. From there I went to Woodstock Academy (founded as a private school
in 1801, I think), four miles away, in the same townshipbut in a
different village. (Part of the time, I drove a horse and buggy to
schoolbut some of the time I walked.) There were about fifty students,
and four teachers. I was too young to get into athletics; I had been pushed
from second to fourth grade in grammar school, and from seventh directly to
high school, skipping the eighth. Later, I worked for a year selling groceries
in Providence, Rhode Island. Then I went on to Gordon College of Theology and
Missions, in Boston (after my mother sent in my applicationsince I was
too bashful to do it myself!). I graduated in 1933, with a major in New
Testament Greek.

In 1980 my wife Evelyn and I were lecturing for a month in Beijing. At the
end, the leading scholars gave us a good-bye dinner. They were top scholars in
Chinawith Ph.D.s from Oxford, Chicago, Yale, and Edinburgh. One of
them said to me: I am just back from lecturing at Berkeley, and heard an
interesting rumorare you a missionary, or are you a linguist? I
replied to him, as best I can remember, as follows: In 1932, as a
Christmas present to God, I applied to become a missionary to Chinato
live or die I didnt care which. I couldnt go because of health. But
to serve God is still my first aim. I think, however, that if you were to ask
the students who have heard us lecturing that they would tell you that we are
interested in linguistics! This double attitude grew out of my
background.

My father had been a medical missionary as a young man at Metlakhatla,
Alaska, in 1900, just out of medical school at the University of Michigan. But
his health broke in one year. I think I must have inherited that weakness of
health, which probably blocked my going to China. So I tried for a year,
climbing trees as part of my job, to build my strengthbut I did not
overcome the problem, apparently. So I went back for a graduate year to Gordon
College, and it was during this extra year that I learned that W. Cameron
Townsend had in 1934 started a summer linguistic training school in Arkansas
for Bible translators. I hitchhiked out there (five days!) to be with him in
the summer of 1935.

There were five of us young men who were students. That experience set the
tone for the rest of my life. Townsend was encouraging us to join him in a new
major adventureto get ready to study a thousand languages which seemed to
need attention, to work to translate the New Testament into these languages
where they did not have alphabets or written grammar, or Scriptures; to write
scientific linguistic articles discussing them, for the benefit of the academic
community; to prepare literacy materials and teach people to read their own
languages, to help them to become members of the literate community of their
countries; and to help with practical work in community development. This
combination he had developed himself by a number of years work in
Guatemala, working with the Cakchiquel language.

Curiously enough, Townsend had not himself had linguistic trainingbut
he gave us an extraordinarily impressive model. He took a piece of cardboard
and cut into it a row of windows, one window for each class of
suffixes, stem, and clitics. Then he had strips of paper, each with a column of
affixes written on it, with each slip appropriate to one of the slot positions.
Each slot had its appropriate slip. By raising different slips, he was able to
show thousands of theoretically possible verb forms. (I have often wondered
whether this might have had some impact on my later development of
slot and class in tagmemic theory!)

During that same summer, Dr. Elbert L. McCreery gave us a period of ten or
so days exclusively devoted to phonetics. (He had been a missionary in Africa,
but was currently on the faculty of The Bible Institute of Los Angeles.) This
ten days by a non-professional phonetician opened the door to the
next decade of my academic life! I was captured by phonetics.

2.2 Writingfrom a hospital bed

The next summer, 1936. Townsend had me come back to teach phonetics at the
Institute. And at the end of the summer he wanted me to write a book on it!
This seemed a little bit wild after my total phonetic training of ten days! So
started a few pages, and gave upstarting back to southern Mexico to
follow up the work on the Mixtec language which I had chosen as my area of
research. But on the way back to the area, I broke my left leg, and had to
return to the hospital in Puebla. I decided that God (not just Townsend!)
wanted me to write on phoneticsand that I better start doing it there! So
I began writing eight hours a day in bed, with malaria returning to me, giving
me a fever of 101 or so. (This material later became, roughly, the first half
of my Phonemics book of 1947.)

2.3 Tone (after failure)and a phonetics dissertation

Townsend had me studying the Mixtec language directly, without going through
Spanish, since he did not want the Spanish to interfere with my learning of the
Indian language. A high school boy served as a guide to take me to the
areaand then left me there.

I had previously found, when I was working with an old man in Mexico City
for two hours, with Townsend as interpreter, that the language was tonal! The
difference between one and nine was obviously one of
pitch! This was a surprise. And for two years it continued to be a problem,
unsolved. Townsend, however, then urged me to go to the University of Michigan
in the summer of 1937 to study with Edward Sapir, who was going to be teaching
there. During the course of that summer I had a coffee cup meeting
with him for an hour or so, in which he explained to me how he had solved the
tone analysis of Navaho by using the substitution of various words in a phrase
(which I call a frame, within which one syllable remained constant,
with a high pitch, so that he could compare the substituted words with the
constant high pitch at the end of the frame). I returned to the Mixtec area
that fall, and took several months getting the vocabulary ready. When I tried
out the frame technique, I was able to see that the Mixtec had three
toneshigh, mid, and low. (A thing which had cost me great difficulty,
which held up my analysis, wasin a way completely unexpected by
methat certain words caused other words to change their pitch
[morphophonemically], with rules which were hidden from the surface.) When I
returned to Michigan a year later, in the summer, professor Fries (who was my
mentor) arranged for me to lecture to the faculty on this pitch material, and
he urged me to do a dissertation on it, afterwards. (This, eventually, resulted
in my book on Tone Languages published in final
form in 1948, but mimeographed earlier.)

But in the summer of 1938 I returned to Michigan, and was asked by George
Trager to show him how to make implosive stops. I had had to learn to handle
them for Cakchiquel, since one of their speakers was a model for my students in
1936. I had had difficulty until I got help, in correspondence, from a Dr.
Cummings, who had studied these sounds in India. Trager asked me to lecture on
this to his class. Charles Hockett was present, and asked for a written copy of
the lecturewhich, in fact, I had not written. This turned out to be
doubly awkward, because (as I mentioned above) the preceding summer Professor
Fries had asked me to do a dissertation on the tone material. Yet instead of
writing on tone I ended up working the whole winter writing on the phonetics!
But Fries, as a result, now let me switch to make the phonetics my
dissertationwhich was finished and presented in 1941 to my committee,
which included, among others, Bloomfield, Sturtevant, Marckwardt, and Fries as
Chairman. (Fries then arranged to have this published by the University of
Michigan Press in 1943.)

2.4 English pronunciation and intonation

In 1942, Fries asked me to help on the preparation of materials for teaching
English to Latin Americans. I came to Ann Arbor to work on that, at the newly
developed English Language Institute. But one of the instructors was unhappy
because a student didnt sound friendly, in his greetings, and
she wanted to know why. In working on this, I brought to bear on English
intonation the frame techniques which I had used for analyzing the Mixtec tone
(a paradigmatic replacement of contrastive intonational pronunciations of a
phrase within a clause frame). This resulted in a preliminary volume on
pronunciation in 1942, and eventually led to my book on the Intonation of American English in 1945. It differed from
the approach of some other scholars in that it emphasized contrastive pitch
patterns, with different meanings, at particular points in a possible
statement. Some scholars were more interested in a syntagmatic, rather than a
paradigmatic, relationship, with emphasis on longer stretches. I wanted both. I
wanted to be able to get the contrast of a dozen different pronunciations at a
particular place in a sequence, and I also wanted to be able to have a number
of those smaller bits united into larger syntagmatic ones. (This was possible
when I had four contrastive levels of pitch, from extra high, to high, to med,
to low, in which the stress could be on any one of the four, and then the
following pitches could be either falling or rising where it was appropriate.
And, in other contrastive bits, it could be a fall followed by a rise, or vice
versa; and there could be one or more preceding unstressed syllables joined to
the rhythm unit of the whole.)

2.5 A two-page phonetic-phonemic procedural syllabus

Earlier, in 1936, I had needed to teach phonetics. And in that summer Eugene
Nida had called my attention to Bloomfields book Language of 1933, which I had not seen. By 1937 I was
reading phonetic materials by Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh. And I needed to
teach my students not only the phonetics, but also the phonemics which I was
now studyingin which I had had further training at the University of
Michigan in the summer of 37 and 38.

In the fall of 1938, I was going to marry Evelyn Griset (niece of Cameron
Townsend). While we were getting ready for the ceremony in Mexico City, I was
publishing my first procedural material on phonetics and phonemics. It
comprised one page, two sideswith phonetics on one side and with a
summary of the procedures of how to analyze the phonemes of the language, on
the other. (The phonemics included tone analysis as well!) This material has
now been republished as Appendix 4Phonemic Worksheetin
Grammatical Analysis by Kennth L. Pike & Evelyn
G. Pike (2nd edition, 1982). (It still astonishes me that in such a small space
one could capture such a large percentage of necessary procedural material for
fieldwork.)

2.6 Plus, simultaneously, New Testament translation

During this decade, some translation was squeezed into the gaps between
writing on phonetics, summer teaching of phonetics and phonemics, doing a
doctorate, working in Michigan on intonation, trips to Peru, Australia, and
England (in the latter two places starting SIL summer schools). In these
gaps, I was able to work with Donald Stark and my Mixtec associate,
Angel Merecías Sanchez on the translation of the New Testament into the
Mixtec. Angel had only been through the fourth grade in grammar school, but was
exceedingly brilliant. He learned to type; he could proofread the tones much
more accurately than I (and he seems to me to be as brilliant as any professor
I have ever met.) We got started on the work, and had the gospel of Mark and
the letter to the Philippians published by 1947. The full New Testament was
passed on to other colleagues for final revision and checking, and was
published in 1951.

That's the first decade stretched on over into the next one, in
its basic academic, religious, and social drives.